This blogger.com profile is squatting YC founder's names | Hacker News Reader

This blogger.com profile is squatting YC founder's names

blogger.com

64 pointsfriism44 comments

Why would this be an issue?

That is, why is this an issue that's any more important than that Chinese ISP that keeps sending you emails about the .cn version of your domain name? Having yourname.blogspot.com wasn't a priority yesterday, so why is it in any way bad news to find that it's not available today?

There are a million places to register unique names for things. Some (like .com domains) have value, some (like Geocities profiles, square feet of peat at the Lagavulin distillery, and .blogspot.com subdomains) do not.

That would be the other Islay single malt, Laphroaig.

Every time I see Blogger.com I'm always shocked that the site still looks exactly like it did years ago -- it's had even has less TLC than Yahoo! has given Flickr. It really speaks volumes about a lack of focus at Google -- in the time Blogger has atrophied we've seen the likes of Movable Type, Wordpress and Tumblr arrive on the scene -- so that's at least three generations of blog that blogger.com is behind at current count. Honestly someone squatting on a blogger namespace seems almost as silly as setting up a myspace page at this point...

You imply Flickr's gotten no love from Yahoo!, but that's not true at all. Just last year they completely revemped one of the most important pages on their site: The photo page - http://blog.flickr.net/en/2010/06/23/a-new-photo-experience-...

And they've made lots of improvements all over the site over the years. Flickr is one of the remaining products at Yahoo! that's gotten any serious love lately.

Indeed. A lot of hard work went into the photo page redesign/rebuild. It's difficult majorly overhauling a site that serves so many different needs to so many different kinds of users.

Too bad for all that work, it just got worse.

The photo view experience on Flickr is slower than any of its competitors. Slow slow sloooooow.

Plus recently, some of my photos have started to break (as in broken images).

It just feels like it's dead.

Incremental improvements (that aren't always improvements) aren't what Flickr needs. They need some vision and balls.

Hi, sorry you've had some difficulties with the site. We've made performance a big focus on the photo page but there's other sections of the site we're still trying to make faster. Regarding the broken images, we should be all clear on that (we recently brought up a new image cluster), so if you're still seeing that, let me know. I'm caudill @ yahoo-inc.com.

I apologize if you read that as a diss of Yahoo! — although compare the investment of Yahoo! in Flickr to say the investment of Apple into the iPod (which grew into the iPhone then the iPad). Or thing about the rate that Facebook has evolved in terms of adding feature sets over the last few years.

From someone that has been using them the past five years on a regular basis they do keep adding features and polishing old ones and I keep returning because of that fact.

You guys gotta know that even though Yahoo is kind of an old player here in Europe/US, Yahoo Japan is by far the most visited site in Japan and the most widely used search engine with a market of around 70%. Nonetheless Yahoo (the actual one) only owns around 35% of the shares so that Softbank with the rest of them actually runs it. The guys are doing it pretty nicely with yahoo mail, the site and flickr, it is a shame that their time has gone by.

Interestingly, Yahoo Japan's search is actually google search now. Google search is the most popular by far. I prefer DuckDuckGo however.

Blogger is constantly getting new features. They even have a complete new design rolling out. http://buzz.blogger.com/2011/03/whats-new-with-blogger.html

You're somewhat mistaken. Blogger hasn't stayed still. It's actually gotten worse.

They used to be the best game in town because they had a simple tool to spit out a HTML-only version of your blog and FTP it wherever you wanted. The result was a blog that you could host on a cheap VPS and have it actually stand up to five people hitting it at once (unlike everybody's self-hosted Wordpress setup).

It was a really cool feature, and a giant pain point when it went away because there still to this day is not a replacement for it. If you want to static-host your blog in 2011, you need to write code.

  > If you want to static-host your blog in 2011, you need
  > to write code.

Or use Amazon S3... some config needed, but no need to write code: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/02/host-your-static-website-...

That's exactly my point. If you want to host a blog today on an FTP server or Amazon S3, you need to design yourself a template and build a bunch of HTML pages, either in a text editor or with some random desktop tool or something you rolled yourself. Then you need to transfer the files to the server, either by hand or via a script of some sort.

If you wanted to do that 5 years ago, you'd sign up for Blogger and use their awesome free software to do it for you.

> If you want to static-host your blog in 2011, you need to write code.

Or use software like jekyll.

https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll

I appreciate that you're trying to help, but this is another example that underscores my point. This is software that you install on a server, run, then manually upload the results to a server.

Blogger was a website where you could type text into a box and hit "go", thus publishing a Slashdot-proof static website via FTP.

For you and me, I'll grant that there's not much of a difference there. Imagine a hosted version of Jekyll, with an option to enter a FTP host/user/pass to automatically upload posts, and you'd have a rough approximation of the service that I'm describing (and which would still be a good idea for somebody to build as a paid product).

Here's the cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:FFeY7yQ...

Looks like blogger/google took it down.

Maybe he saw the thread? Domains are registered under a Chris Curran.

Opportunists don't bother me, but this is pretty tacky.

It's a pain to have a common name sometimes. It's worse when you share it with someone who uses such low tactics. There are thousands of Chris Currans.

Selling accounts like he was seems to be in violation of the blogger terms of use, relevant section: "7. No Resale of the Service. Unless expressly authorized in writing by Google, you agree not to reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, trade, resell or exploit for any commercial purposes (a) any portion of the Service, (b) use of the Service, or (c) access to the Service."

Although I didn't see any way to report the violation.

Was he reselling blogger accounts or just domains?

Seems it was selling domains (that's what happens when skimming and not paying attention to URLs) but blogger was being used as a placeholder and directory type thing, so that probably falls into the category of "exploit for any commercial purposes"

Anyone contacted him? I've always wondered what user names go for. Anyone thought of making an exchange for these? Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin URLs?

I'm thinking about proposing to buy it for an amount covering his cost except a dollar. He will still lose money (which should serve as a valuable lesson), but not as much as if I never buy it - and I really don't need it anyway...

Why would he accept?

What would you pick: lose a dollar or lose the cost of a domain? (the cost of a domain is still more than dollar)

What if the satisfaction of not selling it to you is worth more than a dollar to him/her?

Some cyber squatter has my fistnamelastname.com, and several thousand others (including celebs and typo-based domains). I contacted him about and he made it clear that he was looking for something in the 10k-250k range. I offered $500 and got no response. A non-commercial domain shouldn't command that kind of price, but the cost of sitting on it just isn't high enough to discourage squatters from doing it and waiting for the occasional big payout.

Edit: the squatters name is David Webb in case anyone else has had to deal with him.

Jason Bourne is now a domain squatter?

Boy I can't believe you were going to pay 500 bucks for a .com domain with your name. The guy who's owning mine is asking for not less than $6K so I just went for the '.me' which is at least as nice looking as '.com' and adds a cool factor to your emails/business cards. Everyone seems not to believe that your email can be me@yourname.me but I'd say that it looks catchy aint it?

Yeah, much better uses for $6k....

I might go for me@yourna.me ;)

squatting on YC companies seems to be popular.

For example a few weeks ago airnb.com sold for 5 grand on GoDaddy.

I just realized—it's probably a great investment to buy common misspellings of your own company's name. They can bring more traffic to your site (and keep you from having to pay name sharks.) If your company decides they don't need them, you can probably flip them for a big profit.

Your company's got to be pretty huge before they're worth anything significant, at which point the cash isn't worth the hassle of having someone leeching from you.

Always a a great idea. I always try to if it's not too pricey.

When launching Truemors, Guy Kawasaki registered 55 domains to "surround" truemors.com.

This represented 9% of his total budget.

(From Kawasaki's 2008 book Reality Check).

was it worth it?

Probably not that great of an investment. If you can get it for cheap, why not. Most users I've encountered don't even use the domain name anymore. They "Google it" and click the link that Google brings up.

If anything your probably better off buying adwords for your company.

Indeed. Twiddla still gets a dozen hits a day from people typing "twidla.com" into their browser. I'm sure we have users who think that's the correct name.

Yes, I try to get every 1-2 step removed likely variation (if it is two words, get the concatenated and dash variants, get the various gTLDs (at least .com/.net), easy misspellings, etc.

An annoying thing for me is that right now for my company I have ~everything except first-last.com, which is taken by another company in the general field (but unused). firstlast.com is the primary form, but since it is two words, the dash variant is pretty important.

who cares?

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